CES 2013: Toyota and Audi to roll out autonomous cars

It’s 2013 and humans have advanced a lot in terms of technological capabilities. The Consumer Electronics Show is near and we will be seeing a lot of companies display their products which are made using the latest technology.

CES is always exciting. LG has already announced that they will be launching line up of smart home appliances that are intelligent and communicate with each other. According to the latest reports, Toyota and Audi will be rolling out new self-driving cars at the CES this year. Google has been working on self-driving cars for several years now and according to the videos they have showed, the future is pretty close. Of course it isn’t just the search engine giant into developing autonomous cars. Several companies in the automobile industry are working hard to get the same results and Toyota and Audi are preparing to show off their own semi-driverless cars at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, which will be taking place on 8th of January in Las Vegas.

Toyota will be showcasing a special version of luxury Lexus LS which will sport rotating radar on top of the car and cameras on the front. The car will also be equipped with Intelligent Transport Systems which will basically help the car’s system to communicate with other cars in the surrounding as well as with the highway “grid”, which can thought of as a decentralized computer network that can coordinate other vehicle’s path, much like an aircraft’s anti-collision system.

Toyata has already leaked a video of the car in action on their official website, and if we take a look at the video we can make out that much of the work has been completed. The car can be seen speeding down the highway without a driver inside it. All the additional equipment such as the radar and cameras are visible from outside, which isn’t great from aesthetic point of view, and also it isn’t aerodynamic, but I’m sure they will conceal all that in the production version in the future and make the car look great.

Audi has also developed somewhat similar, but the company is keeping its lips zipped until the official announcement at the CES. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Audi will be launching a car which will have the ability to find parking spot on its own and park itself in that spot without any input from the driver. Audi’s been working on autonomous vehicle technology for quite a while, and so have Ford and Mercedes-Benz.

There are a small number of driverless cars available in the market right now, but all of them are considered “semi-autonomous.” They need some sort of input from humans and at this point they just add features which reduce the driver input to certain extent, but they cannot do tasks autonomously. The new cars from Toyota and Audi aim to offer complete autonomy with very little to no input from driver. The future looks promising. What are your thoughts on this? Let us know using the comment form below.

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